Laterality in face paintings of renaissance and cubism art styles

Faces have been shown to be primarily processed by the right hemisphere, such that there is an advantage in their processing when they are presented in the left portion of the visual field. In the present research, we explore face lateralization in the context of faces in paintings. While prior research in art perception has explored hemispheric asymmetries, the role of a right-hemispheric advantage is still debated. Using a hemifield paradigm, we explored the accuracy of face identification in photographs of real faces, as well as in paintings with different art styles, differing in the extent to which they are realistic (renaissance) or distorted (cubism). Performance for photographs was higher when presented in the left half of the visual field, displaying a right hemisphere lateralization; similarly, a right hemisphere advantage in face processing was found for faces in paintings, regardless of how realistic the art style was. All in all, we found evidence of a right hemisphere advantage across stimuli categories. We consider these in relation to other phenomena in face processing literature (e.g., pareidolia), and discuss implications based on these parallels, namely regarding the time course of face perception.